Verizon announces the Droid Mini, Droid Ultra and Droid Maxx

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Verizon and Motorola have announced three new Droid phones to be available soon, in an attempt to offer something for everyone.

We’ve known that Verizon was up to something for a little while now, and thanks to the leaks we had a pretty good idea Motorola was involved. The DroidLanding twitter account has been resurrected, a new AR game stepped up to keep people thinking about Droid, and now the phones are finally here.

The Droid Mini, Droid Ultra, and Droid Maxx are three different phones with identical user interfaces designed to offer something for every kind of user on Verizon Wireless. The phones look and feel like thinner, sharper versions of the Droid Razr phones that were announced last year, and these successors to the Droid throne seem able to step up and compete with the flagships on the market today.

The new Droid line up is all about being as similar as posisble in three different form factors. Each phone is sporting the familiar kevlar design on the back of the phone, with the Mini looking like the old Razr M and the Maxx looking like the Razr Maxx HD. The Mini has kept the 4.3-inch size from the original M, while the Ultra and the Maxx have traded up to 5-inch screens.

The Droid Ultra stands out in bright red, but still packs a design familiar to the Razd HD from last year. What you give up for that incredibly slim profile and firetruck red paint job (it’s also available in black or white) is wireless charging, which the other two phones have.

The big features being announced with these new phones are a crazy battery boost with the Maxx and a 10MP camera in the Ultra. The Maxx is now rated for 48 hours of battery life as opposed to the previous 32 hours, and manages to be nearly a full milimeter thinner than its predecessor.

The phones are being driven by a unique new octo-core processor, dubbed the Motorola X8 mobile computing system. The X8 splits processing power between GPU, application, contextual computing, and natural language processing. According to Motorola, the core split gives four cores to the GPU and two cores to application processing, leaving one for context and the other for listening and understanding you as you talk. As a result, the new Droid lineup features always listening command systems and a refreshed UI that very closely resembles the current Moto UI to handle the experience.

The new Droid phones will feature the voice control system seen recently in the Moto X video leaks, where you can wake the phone and give commands without ever having to touch the phone. The phone personalizes its responses to you, and in the demo the phone was aware of the name of the user. Also included from the Moto X leak is the active notification display, which only lights up a portion of the display with a simple notification as opposed to using a notification light to show you what you are missing on your phone. The new Droid lineup will also come with a quick capture feature that takes photos instantly, as well as a sharing tool that is sadly dubbed Droid Zap to push photos to friends nearby.

Motorola is showing off their new Google parent by including Google Music and Ingress with the new phones. These will be the first phones to include Ingress on the phone, and anyone who picks one of these handsets before September 30 gets 6 months of Google Play Music All Access for free.

The Droid Mini starts off at $99 on a new contract, making the Ultra $199 and the Maxx $299. It’s an impressive launch from Verizon, and it will be very interesting to see how these phones hold up against the current Snapdragon based flagships on the market today.